EVENTS

Same old song, this time in German

A news report says that the Catholic Church in Germany seems to be guilty of the same kinds of crimes that it has committed in the US and Ireland and elsewhere.

A report about child sexual abuse in the Roman Catholic Church in Germany, based on victim accounts and released by the church this week, showed that priests carefully planned their assaults and frequently abused the same children repeatedly for years.
…
The church’s credibility regarding its commitment to an impartial investigation suffered a fresh blow last week when the bishops canceled an independent study into the abuse scandal amid allegations by the independent investigator, Christian Pfeiffer, that the church was censoring information.
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Germans were further outraged by reports this week that two Roman Catholic hospitals in Cologne had refused to carry out a gynecological examination on a 25-year-old suspected rape victim. An emergency doctor who had helped the woman told the newspaper Kölner Stadt-Anzeiger that the hospitals cited ethical objections to advise women on unwanted pregnancies and on steps that can be taken to prevent them, like the morning-after pill. The Archdiocese of Cologne denied that the church refuses to treat rape victims. The hospitals blamed a “misunderstanding” and said the matter was under investigation.

Ah, yes, those pesky ‘misunderstandings’. Like the ever-popular ‘taken out of context’ they are convenient ways of avoiding admitting wrongdoing and accountability.

When one sees this kind of global pattern of awful behavior, it definitely points to a structure that is rotten through and through. It is extraordinary to me that the authorities in any country haven’t thrown the book at the church. If (say) a school had been guilty of similar long-standing abuses and cover-ups, it would have been shut down. It just shows the negative consequences of the undue respect that religion enjoys.

One is registered in Germany as a member of the denomination the parents want the child to belong to.
This registered denomination will follow throughout live, and will be noted in the income tax registry.
A “religious tax” will be deducted automatically for catholics and send to the the catholic church.

One has to sign a declaration of leaving the church to remove this tax as part of the income tax. A notice will be sent to the church office, and one is no longer a member of the catholic community.

I did this when I was 16 and started my working live.
As an atheist from age 14 on I had no desire to send part of my income to an institution I found abhorrent.

The situation in Cologne was such that the doctors in question were afraid of losing their jobs.
Bear with me here:
1) Nominally Catholic hospitals (actually 90% taxpayer-funded,natch) do not offer abortions or the morning-after-pill,because Jesus!!!
2) Standard emergency care for a rape vitim in any German hospital includes the mention of the option of the morning-after-pill (and/or abortion) ,but not the active recomendation of such (as the Catholics won’t do such a thing)
3) Anti-choice scumbags have shown up in the emergency rooms of Catholic hospitals,tearfully begging for a prescription for a morning after pill,only to snitch on the few doctors who would have a heart and go against hospital policy.
4) Those poor doctors got fired.
5) Doctors in Catholic hospitals have gotten scared shitless.So scared that cases like this one happen.
The young woman already had the prescription for the morning-after-pill BEFORE she even tried to access a hospital (yay for feminist first-responder doctor!),they still wouldn’t go near her for fear for their jobs.And,maybe,callousness.

It’s not just because of that snitching. Religious hospitals, schools and daycare centers don’t have to obey normal labor laws. They can fire anyone for any reason. Leave the church, divorce and remarry, be gay, or don’t belong to the right church in the first place and you’re gone. Courts have only begun to make distinctions based on how much the worker in question is actually involved in religious activities. There have been some positive rulings, but nothing binding yet.

Neither child abuse nor theological gynæcology is geographically confined: the RC church has the universality that its name implies. Hospitals (not to mention legislatures) controlled by the RC church pose a huge problem for women’s health in much of the north central USA. (BTW, steve84 seems to be referring to the US situation, or?)